Tag: Ethics

This is such a common practice now, few object to it. But it still does not feel right to me – and I want to raise my feeble voice against it.

The common attitude seems to be “The only way to get ahead is doing whatever is necessary to survive in a highly competitive world.” Taking care of other people can wait for awhile.

But taking care of other people cannot wait – it has to be done now, as part of our normal practices – including business practices. This is what makes Business work – honesty. Trading defective products wrecks the entire trading process. It destroys the Market.

But this is going on. It’s all too easy, as life becomes more complicated – to sneak in a little dishonesty – to make a little more money for ourselves, at the expense of others. Nobody will notice. But whether anyone notices or not, does not matter. The atmosphere is poisoned for everyone.

I grew up in an American Midwest that produced most of the world’s products – but it is now a Rust Belt that produces nothing. Too many people were only interest in taking care of themselves – at the expense of others.

My observation that people can decide to not be – seems to be my own analysis. No one else is interested in it.

I developed this theory from watching my wife Beth succumb to mental illness. She tried to do many things – including being a loving wife to me – but failed at all of them. Eventually, several years later – she killed herself.

This was taking things to an extreme, but people can become incapacitated in many ways – and can barely function. Dysfunctional families are good examples of this – and are common in America.

This situation is also common on a much larger scale. Civilizations have collapsed many times – and the people involved had different explanations for this (their gods had left them, for example). But the results were always the same – the loss of power by those in power. In individual psychosis, the individual loses power to other forces in his life.

Our global economy collapsed sometime in the last half of the last century. This was hard to understand – how could everything fail? It could fail because we are only a small part of the world – and have been living off of everything else. Once these global resources were depleted, our economy had to contract.

How did people cope with this? They decided to not be. This was too much for them to understand – so they didn’t try to understand it. They stopped thinking, and stopped being. And they thought this was being very smart.

They didn’t stop thinking about everything, they had to continue solving their small problems – but they stopped thinking about their big problems.

And their biggest problem, was realizing that they could not take from the rest of the world, at an every-increasing rate – forever.

This is a nice, clean logical explanation – and there is nothing wrong with it. But I also have another explanation – the loss of Virtue – or its equivalent, the acceptance of Greed in Business.

I previously made an ecological explanation – I am now making an ethical one.

Humans can be defined as thinking beings – and they can also be defined as ethical beings. If they stop being ethical – they stop being.

The overall effect will be the same as before – a collapse of their civilization. If they stop being – their culture stops being also.